presence of mind
by Aiko Isari
Summary: [yagi toshinori centric] When does the soothing truth become the mantra to survive?
1. 1

_Notes: Events here are harmful to minors, also this is supremely fan theory._

* * *

1.

Physically, he is born at the time where law and disorder are in constant, violent fisticuffs. He is born to affluence dressed in squalor. Yagi Toshinori took this contradiction and questioned it as he aged. But at the moment of his birth, at the sight of the new sun, he questioned none of it. He was a baby, and then a toddler. A baby has no concept of anything beyond itself and its own. They simply did not need to.

There are so many people who are capable of good and evil. For Toshinori, everything is vibrant and new like the sun.

But someday that sun will be eclipsed.

* * *

 ** _A/N:_** And here we go! This came to mind during a reread of the manga and since I have virtually no idea if and when we'll get much information about this whole thing about the guy, I ran with this. Please let me know what you think, how this all sounds as it goes, etcetera. Thanks a lot!


	2. 2

2.

Everyone around him has a Quirk.

His parents have Quirks. His mother sneezes and makes flowers. His father can turn paper into a deadly weapon. He has seen numerous traps around the house that would slice a muscular man from the soles of his feet to the tip of his nose and all in between. He steps carefully at his small age, on his chubby legs and waits for the ability to grow things, to build ships with dances of his palms.

Which he can do, but it is not like breathing. It is learned. THere is nothing that comes to him naturally like breathing. Except smiling.

Oh how he smiles. Maybe that's his power: his smile, and with it the strength it holds.

It gives him none.


	3. 3

3.

The world is not lawless. Is parents are very much in love and they do their taxes.

They also lock their doors three times. THey also give him a can of mace at the age of five. Their disappointment in his lack of a Quirk is palpable, but it's not for what it could be, or in other neighborhoods, what it would be.

Toshinori practices pepper spray on tree trunks with reluctance and kicking the shins of bullies without it. He has some childish hope that his responses will cause villains and villainy all over the world to cease. It does not. It only stops the other children because he is stronger. Even that is wrong.

Toshinori just got lucky and luck runs out.


	4. 4

4.

School is pointless.

The teachers are all too old and Quirkless to deal with children who are breathing fire and making small objects float and healing people. Toshinori wants to read, wants to look at the stories of heroes before heroics were real, of good guys saving the bad. They really saved them in those books. Right now, all they were was a bunch of superstars with a giant sky to shine in.

Stars burnt out quickly, leaving patchy holes in their wake. At least his father tells him so. He could be wrong, but that's not likely.

He is not burning out yet. He still has something. That something he is sure of. But it helps him to find a point.


	5. 5

5.

His mother comes home to see his face wrecked again, from the same old song and dance. He is seven years old and nothing special. But worse, he's Quirkless in a rapidly changing world. And she cannot save him. Her flowers save no one.

But she can poison, and when the gunshots ring out outside like the yakuza of old, she makes that very clear. There was silence for a solid week, and then a week more.

They never bother their family again.


	6. 6

6.

He is nine when the lack of a quirk is made scientific in explanation. It changes nothing. There are just rich words and poor people thinking they understand them. Classmates rib him with them and he finds himself lashing out in a way he never considered: a smile. He smiles and dodges. These people are hale and healthy. Their quirks determine their happiness in one way or another.

It will not determine his.

He goes to the library and the bullies do not follow.

He watches heroic society from his tiny television and wonders. He wonders.

Of course, wonder has its limits and he ends up doing math instead.


	7. 7

7.

He first met a hero after failing to fly.

It was particularly stupid, seeing as he tried to jump off of a building with hopes and dreams and duct tape. He ended up being caught by his ankles, blonde hair dangling with the blood rushing to his head.

"Well now," she says to him. "What did you think you were doing?

"Making myself have a quirk," he replied. At the time he'd held just enough innocence to believe that was the right thing and possible. He had enough distance to not believe doctor records and hard fact. He was not wealthy enough to have his despair muted like so.

The woman's eyes wobbled despite the heavy weight of her smile.

Later, he understood.


	8. 8

8.

"You need to smile more."

"You're so blunt!"

"You're too serious."

She's weird, this woman, this heroic woman who had grabbed him and broken his fall, who wowed his parents with explanations of her duty to their dilapidated neighborhood. Her new assignment, as it turned out. It was that one back alley of Tokyo that was just presentable enough that no one could complain about it out loud.

His parents had fallen over her feet, joyful at the thought of someone caring about him in even the vaguest of ways.

The woman was actually off her rocker, but she was also a hero. She was a real one, one who made random civilians smile or helped them with the little tasks.

And he had no idea what her name was.

That was just plain rude.


	9. 9

9.

She visits their school the year he turns twelve. She tells them about middle school about education and the new world that awaited them if they did well. No one believed her, not at first, until the smile left her face in the most tragic of ways and she said:

"There's a whole class of vigilantes right in front of me, and I could arrest them today."

It was the oddest statement, and it didn't make any sense whatsoever except in the comics from the before times. He did nothing that was too egregious surely. Only what he needed to. Only so he could live. Surely, that wasn't wrong, was it?

She continued slowly, unfazed by the fear that was crossing the confused student's faces. "All this misuse of superpowers, you all are aware of how wrong that is. Are you really any better than the people you tease?"

The words mean little to him at first. Maybe this isn't about him after all.

Except, he realizes many days later, after she finished with the announcement of a hero school and how behavior impacted their ability to get in, it is about him.

A quirky boy is found dead by his house.


	10. 10

10.

It's not one of his classmates, but they would have gone to his school, one year later.

Toshinori doesn't ignore it. He can't. Because quirkless are just walking targets. How can he survive?

His parents give him a knife. He doesn't question it, but it hurts. He keeps a letter opener in his boots because he doesn't know what else he'll need. How can he, he's a child?

And the children have no reason not to be normal children but for fear.

That's not right. He can't explain why but it just isn't right.

Can he do something about it?


	11. 11

11.

She finds him again, this time whispering to the cat he's just pulled from the tree about how brave she was and how clever, and Toshinori is relatively certain that his whispering is keeping the cat from chewing his face off because it sounds harmless and pathetic and endearing.

When he is able to put the cat down and let it scamper away, she applauds, baffling him and nearly sending him back up the tree.

"Not bad!" She crows. "Not bad at all! You've got a good voice for a hero! Very easy and smooth! You'd be good for rescue support!"

It doesn't offend him, not really. She seems to know how it sounds and isn't trying to soften the blow. It's not insulting. It simply is.

"Thank you," Toshinori says, remembering his manners.

She was suddenly in front of him, stretching the sides of his mouth with her gloved fingers until they formed a facsimile of a smile. "You've gotta mean it," she said with a grin. "You've gotta smile and laugh. If you want to change people's minds and hearts anyway, you have to mean you want the change. You just look unhappy."

"Probably because I'm not happy."

"But why aren't you?" She asked this cheerfully enough before what was likely a distant cry pulls her away from him.


	12. 12

12.

Why was the most annoying question on the face of the earth. It was the worst when the answer seemed the most obvious. But she wasn't around so he could yell it at her and get the oh a lot of adults got before they resigned themselves to no longer getting involved and left him to it.

Except when she did come back, it was with that big old grin his mother got after a long satisfying day at work. Then, she declared to him (and the rest of the world probably), that-

"I've decided! I will train you into a hero!"

Him? Quirkless old him?

"There's a reason that heroes in old stories have powers, you know." It's half hearted to say because his entire being is thumping with excitement. His whole soul is threatening to explode out of him in bursts of light and sound and glowing teeth.

She nodded, like she expected this objection already. "Yes, yes, but I can help you with that. If you let me. ANd if you're willing to work."


	13. 13

13.

If he's willing to work.

If he gets this, he'll be able to go home and his parents don't have to leave death traps with their harmless little quirks.

There won't be as many -no, there won't be _any-_ more dead quirky kids by his house.

"What do I have to do?"

The woman smiles. "Run."

Ten minutes later, he realizes she meant that literally.


	14. 14

14.

His entire school life changes. His entire life changes.

He's up before the sun is, He's in school studying frantically ahead in the book before his teacher even arrives. He's no longer tasting a drop of soda unless he's going to vomit. He hasn't seen a red bean paste bun in a month and a half.

It's so expensive. It would be too expensive if sensei wasn't the one footing it like she had money.

"We're not official yet," she had told him as casually as someone picking up a cat from the floor. "So there's no proper code for people quite yet. They don't know how much to pay us. Might as well enjoy it while we can."

Toshinori feels a vague sense of envy and he can't put it to words because it can't be helped. It just can't.


	15. 15

15.

The first thing she really truly teaches him though, is not to help everyone.

Granted he wasn't really doing that before. Sure, he uh, ran around hiting the people who thought they could just get away with things because they were bigger and people were smaller. And he ran errands because itwas good exercise and he could. But that wasn't the same.

Not the same as seeing a thief who could make bombs hold another man hostage for a limp wallet and having to sit there until another man kicked the first in the face so hard his jaw broke.

Sensei says it's not about keeping your nose clean. It's about knowing your boundaries. But seeing that man's fear makes him quiver with indignation.

He wants to be a hero. Heroes _have_ no boundaries.


	16. 16

_character death starts happening as of this chapter_

* * *

16.

He is thirteen. He is thirteen. He is a teenager. That's all this is. His mother being lowered into the ground and he is panicking and emotional because he's a teenager and it hurts extra but that's all. That's all it is, Toshinori is sure.

His tears aren't bad, not exactly. But it's painful, so awful and painful and disgusting that he truly wants to retch all over himself so the filth will make him feel better. IT will make it bearable that an accident happened and made reality that much closer.

God.

She was supposed to see the world he created. They were both supposed to and now his father was just not seeing anything but the pages in front of him.

Toshinori had had no idea.


	17. 17

17.

Sensei gives him time.

Not much but she talks to him. She talks to him about how her husband was always a dangerous little thing. How, even when she decided to be a hero, he wasn't far behind, how until she learned how to jump buildings he followed and made more trouble to clean up.

How she had to be careful visiting him in the hospital.

"He's got no sense of fear," she tells him with delight that masks love and fear that can't win out over each other. "Your parents are the same."

He doesn't take that as meaning this is his fault, because it's not. It's society. Something is wrong with society. And he wants to fix it, or balm it, or something.

"Mom wanted peace," Toshinori says after a long while. "So do I. I want to show people that peace exists. If people had a symbol, they wouldn't fight like this."


	18. 18

18.

At the time, it had been a childish, absurd ideal. But even now he still believed it, somewhere in the flames in his heart. He couldn't help himself. It was too much like dying to just throw away everything he had done.

His teacher appreciates those ideals, she had said. He would have believed her if she hadn't tried to choke him _with a hair._

She had even said it was her hair too. It was the biggest distraction from, well, everything, in the past two months. Toshinori spends the night throwing up.

His father is frightened. His father says nothing.

Figures.


	19. 19

19.

His body... changes.

He suddenly needs all new shirts because they've ripped under his arms, which have briefly swollen to an absurd degree. He's broken something at least once every three days. It's honestly disorienting.

Nana-sensei doesn't seem surprised at all, but then nothing does surprise her. Some things will never change no matter how old he gets.

Still, despite all of the pain, it feels easy. Comfortable, easy and right in his body.

Sensei looks tired.


	20. 20

20.

One week, a man shows up in his school. He's lucky it's that period right after exams or he would have gotten such a smack. He has sober eyes, solemnity in each part of his face.

"You have been accepted into U.A," he tells him. "For the duration of your high school career." His thin nose, makes the angles of his cheekbones all the more terrifying. He is unimpressed by whater he sees.

Honestly, Toshinori can't blame him. Or, he won't, once he's able to catch up to himself. U.A. The new school established for real heroics, real people. It had still been being put together the first time he met sensei. But now it was real, and he... he would get to go.

"Thank you," he manages to say, fire rising up in his belly.

"Thank Nana," he says simply in reply.

Later, Toshinori wonders why she didn't tell him.


	21. 21

21.

 _She's pregnant._

He's gaping, outright. He has never known a pregnant person. Well, no, he has. His aunt was, once upon a time, but no one talks about that. (No one talks about anything in his family anymore, not even dad. They don't even discuss dinner).

But he's never known someone this close to him who mattered, who was pregnant and a hero and somehow no one knew. How could he not have noticed before? Then again, he had been training by himself for days because he couldn't keep a shirt on to save his life.

New superpower or not, that was just _embarrassing._

She doesn't look happy, however. She looks resigned, softly accepting some inevitable, unenviable choice.

Toshinori, unwisely, doesn't ask.

Time passes before he regrets it, even though he knows why by then.


	22. 22

22.

At the time he had gone to Yuuei, the sports festival wasn't as exciting, as flashy. He still had to prepare.

Nana-sensei had sent him alone, because he didn't have any other mentors, and he looked harmless enough that no one would expect him to punch through anything in his path. Besides, all he was doing was observing. The result should have been a harmless ordinary day. His baggy clothes under his jogging suit weren't meant to get shredded.

Then an apartment complex goes boom. Like the best, those that become before and after, Toshinori doesn't think. He acts.

And he smiles. That was sensei's second lesson.


	23. 23

23.

He's caught on camera smiling.

He's not special so he just looks like a lunatic kid who is helping people, because he's smart enough to cover his face and not transform (hulk out, as one comic would put it). It's still too soon, so he just looks like an overgrown kid who is trying to help with some quirk. it's not special yet.

Not until the last twenty minutes. When the next explosion happens.

That's when he starts laughing. He claps his hands and blows the flames sky-high into dust. People are still screaming, but that doesn't matter, he realizes. What matters is what they're screaming for.

They're screaming for _him._

And he laughs because that makes no sense at all. But he'll do it. He really will.

He'll save them all.


	24. 24

24.

Nana's scoldings make his ears ring, even through the likely stupid grin he had plastered onto his face.

"You were supposed to be careful," she's telling him, likely for the fifth time. "You're a high school student, not a vigilante." These rough words are ruined by the fact that she's smiling. Ruined by how proudly she looks at him from the bed.

He's taller than her now, just by a hair. His body feels lighter than it ever did before. He's jealous, so jealous. Not of how she can relax (because now he can't), but by how at peace she seems. How ready.

Ready for what, he doesn't know.


	25. 25

25.

His first year ends quietly enough, because no one knows that a sixteen year old is the one who saved that building on phone cameras. No one has any idea that the quiet kid who likes looking at people's quirks in action and sits right in the middle of the school ranking is the newest hero.

And yet everyone says his name. Everyone talks about _All Might._

Something in him swells.

Another part, the part that knows what it means to cower in his room with the lights off and listen for broken bottles and Molotov cocktails, trembles in fear.


	26. 26

26.

April dawns and there's a new teacher.

He's vaguely familiar, vaguely, but since Toshinori can't put into words other than the sense of dread, he doesn't pay him any attention. He doesn't teach his class on the first day anyhow.

He meets the little boy instead. Shimura Nana's little boy. He looks at Toshinori like he knows everything. He looks so ugly.

Nana laughs, still a little weak she says. "He looked worse when they pulled him out, you know."

"Hm." Toshinori had never, and would never have any siblings, so he had no idea. But he's a very non-fussy little thing, sleeping easily enough.

Looking back, Toshinori wishes he had taken the boy home, for so many reasons.


	27. 27

27.

The new teacher grabs him within the second week, on his way to school. Hie lashes out with One For All, as he's self-taught. It's amazing how natural and easily it flows-

And then he kisses the asphalt. His teeth cringe in his gums, almost flying out but unable, locked into place likely by sheer force of will.

"Interesting," the man says flatly. "You have good instincts and nothing else."

Toshinori would have loved to bristle with anger if the guy hadn't just leveled him to the ground.

"My office," the man continues. "After school. I will teach you how to fight."


	28. 28

28.

The man – Gran Torino – isn't a teacher. He's a _sadist._ And he had thought Nana was a spartan. Toshinori at least could come home and get to bed. He comes home from a day with his new teacher and it's all he can do to collapse on the couch instead of the bed.

"You're working hard," his father says when he wakes up one morning with drool on his face and a blanket that wasn't there when he'd crashed.

Toshinori blinks, nods, notes the bags under his father's eyes. "Y-You too."

The man smiles, like it's a joke or something. But he probably means it, it's very hard to tell these days.


	29. 29

29.

At some point during that year, Shimura Nana gave away her baby. At some point, her power waned. She had told Toshinori at some point, he's sure, but he can't remember it. It's not real until he sees her in a wheelchair, injured in a way that One For All would have rendered useless.

She grins at him. "I dunno, you should have seen the other guy,"

"Sensei," he says. He tries to sound serious, tries to not smile because this is important. She has just given up her child and now she is injured to the point of rehabilitation.

"Toshinori," Nana replies in that same voice, still with a smile. "It's necessary."


	30. 30

30.

Somehow, in the chaos, in the understanding of everything, Toshinori graduates from U.A. with decent grades. He is not perfection on the books, but that doesn't matter. No one knows him, everyone assumes his quirk is just super strength and endurance.

And no one knows he is All Might.

Not even his father. That's the best though. His father doesn't need to know. He's proud, he's smiling.

And now, just as undramatically, he's dead.


	31. 31

31.

The whole thing is honestly very anticlimactic. When one parent is murdered, another going out peacefully while he's struggling through university. Heroes are starting to gain a life, gain traction that matters but it's too slow and too early for Yagi Toshinori. He can't fade into obscurity quite yet. He needs prove that he made something of himself.

So he's still an ordinary man with a secret identity who feels like a little boy with big muscles and powers he can't command.

They can't save everyone, Nana reminds him. In the dull haze, he thinks All Might really can't save anyone who counts to him.

 _That's not true. People matter. You can save them._

He hopes so.


	32. 32

32.

Gran Torino had only taught him for one year, but even thinking of him now gives Toshinori an anxiety attack. He can barely look at the man when he arrives. The man is shrinking into himself a little now, muscles wilting, age taking over. His eyes, however, are sharp and cool, assessing him thoughtfully.

"Nana says you've been doing well."

Toshinori nods cautiously. Sensei still goes with him on patrols some weekends. Nothing else. Not really. She doesn't have the physical energy anymore. She has the emotional drive, the cheerful grit and determination, but that's all. She usually makes dinner, which is good because he's still learning.

"Is she?" The question is wry.

Toshinori hesitates to answer. He has no idea.


	33. 33

33.

Another laughing video.

He expects parodies of him to show up on the internet at some point because of how big his smile is how loud he laughs, his cheesy speeches that come from all the old comics no one remembers. He is rambuctious and flamboyant and present and sometimes Toshinori even believes himself.

He is the Symbol of Peace that people want. He is the hero people think they need.

He will be contracted soon, they say. It's easy. His vocal chords still manage to be deep enough nowadays, so he can do these things all himself.

He's an adult now. He's a hero now.

He's going to faint.


	34. 34

34.

She's dead.

She's dead she's dead she's dead she's dead

She's gone.

Sensei is gone.

He feels the strength coursing through him, the fire within roaring and roaring like the heartless, continuous pound of blood in his ears.

She is gone though. Sensei is gone forever.

Everyone he loves is gone now.


	35. 35

35.

Gran Torino returns to him. There is no body for sensei. There's nothing for her but her cape.

There's video feed. Toshinori doesn't look.

When Gran Torino trains him again, Toshinori doesn't care if it hurts.

He cannot care. He needs the training. He needs to live.

A symbol must carry on.

But Toshinori? Toshinori needs more than that. So much more.


	36. 36

36.

Time blurs together. He has to save people. He has to smile, has to advertise. There is so, so much to do. And it feels good, feels great, feels right.

He visits her grave once a year. He does not look for her son. He smiles every day.

Toshinori hopes that she is proud of him and not All Might. He hopes his parents are with her, talking and laughing freely.

He has hope. He does.


	37. 37

37.

At some point, he loses track of when, he gets an apprentice, a sidekick.

Nighteye is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed every day. He absorbs all the information he's given and while he doesn't rely too much on his Quirk, that's for the best. The boy's plenty smart without it.

He has a frequently broken nose and thin, razor sharp glasses. He looks harmless compared to All Might himself.

This is a bad idea, this is a terrible idea. But he has it. So he's gonna use it.

Heroes could die at any time.


	38. 38

38.

Gran Torino survives.

All Might is busy saving people, barring himself. That's why hearing the old man is hurt at all is honestly _terrifying._

"Don't chase him, Toshinori," he croaks. "Don't."

But All Might for once ignores his masters. For once, the rage and pain fill his heart too much for him to smile.

It's a good thing no one knows it's him.


	39. 39

39.

He wakes up.

Hopeless, alone, he wakes up.

He can't hear, can see white. He does not weep. He cannot. There could be a camera.

Toshinori, empty and alone, weeps anyway. He's an adult and there is no one to comfort him, no one that should.

And yet at the end, at the end, he smiles. He has no choice. It's all he has to believe in.

Sensei's words ring soft and true.

Whatever reality comes, whatever answers await him, he will smile. He will light up the darkness that absorbs his world. He will fill it with hope.

And someday, someone will fill him with it too.


	40. 40

40.

Yagi Toshinori finds his successor by accident.

Sensei would be proud.

A boy with lacking self-worth, a boy with hopeless eyes who had discovered his secret and tried to bear with it. Someone who had decided to be a hero even though he had no power to be.

It's so nostalgic. He can't help the smile he wears when no one is looking.

A new hero is here and that is all the reason he needs.


End file.
